What does AI say about your company?

GEO stands for generative engine optimization. The goal is that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode know your company, name it and cite it with a link when a buyer asks for advice.

GEO builds on SEO. Most assistants search the web live before they answer, in their own index or in the index of Google or Bing. A page that is hard to find or read there rarely makes it into an answer. On top of that, it matters how clearly and consistently your site and other sources describe what you do, for whom and why you can be trusted.

Usage is growing fast. In October 2025 OpenAI reported more than 800 million weekly users for ChatGPT. In July 2025 Google reported more than 2 billion monthly users for AI Overviews and more than 100 million for AI Mode in the United States and India.

A buyer who asks an assistant for a shortlist usually gets three to five names. If you are not among them, no visit follows. So you will not see that loss in Google Analytics either.

We ask every question in the assistant’s own app, each time in a new chat with fixed settings. No history or personalisation colours the answer. In ChatGPT, for example, we use a temporary chat with search on. We ask no follow-up questions.

For each answer we record which companies are named, in what order and with which link. We ask every question twice per assistant, because an assistant can answer differently per session. That gives the share of voice: the share of answers that name you, next to each competitor.

AI answers fluctuate, even when nothing changes. That is why we only count a difference when it is at least 5 percentage points and larger than twice the standard error. That comes down to about 95 percent confidence.

With 156 answers over two rounds, that threshold is around 10 percentage points. Per assistant, with 26 answers, it lies between 18 and 27 points. That is why we measure every month with the same questions and look at the trend over several months.

Only public files: robots.txt, llms.txt, the sitemap, BingSiteAuth.xml, the homepage and up to three pages linked from it. We fetch them without a browser, the way an AI assistant does during a live answer. We never log in and never fill in forms.

The scan weighs eight signals worth 100 points in total: llms.txt (15), the AI crawler policy (15), Content Signals (10), Bing verification (10), the sitemap in robots.txt (10), structured data (15), language and hreflang (10) and fetching without a browser (15). With the SEO quick scan we also check redirects, title, description, H1, canonical, Open Graph, alt texts and the server response.

There are three common causes. The first is robots.txt. AI companies use separate crawlers for training, search and live fetching. At OpenAI these are GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, at Anthropic ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User. Blocking GPTBot keeps OpenAI away from training. Blocking OAI-SearchBot also removes you from ChatGPT search results.

The second is the firewall. Bot protection often stops AI crawlers without anyone knowing. Since 1 July 2025 Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default for new domains.

The third is JavaScript. Research by Vercel and MERJ from December 2024 shows that the major AI crawlers, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot, fetch JavaScript files without running them. Text that only appears in the browser is invisible to them. Gemini uses the Googlebot infrastructure and does render JavaScript.

That is your own choice. Search and live answers are separate from training. You can allow OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot and keep out GPTBot and ClaudeBot.

At Google, Google-Extended decides whether your content may be used for the Gemini models. According to Google, blocking it has no effect on inclusion in Google Search. AI Overviews and AI Mode come from the search index, so blocking Googlebot also costs you that visibility. Content Signals in robots.txt (search, ai-input and ai-train) record per use what is allowed.

llms.txt is a 2024 proposal by Jeremy Howard: a Markdown file in the root of the site, with a short summary and links to the most important pages. It is not an official standard and not every assistant reads it.

It takes little time and gives AI systems a clean summary without menus, scripts and cookie banners. That is why it counts in the scan, for 15 of the 100 points. This page has one too.

SEO is about rankings and clicks in Google and Bing. GEO is about whether you appear in the answer itself, often without anyone clicking through.

The basics overlap: indexability, speed, clear titles and structured data. That is why the scan includes an SEO quick scan. Bing matters more than its market share suggests, because Copilot runs on it and ChatGPT search also uses Bing results.

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Google AI Mode and Bing. In the call we choose which ones matter most for your market. Every assistant gets the same questions, so the results are comparable.

The quick scan is free. For the full audit and the monthly measurement we make a tailored proposal after the call. The price depends on the number of questions, assistants, languages and markets.

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